The awareness of the Unicode Consortium has grown recently, with the spread of emoji. But from the news articles, it’s easy to get the impression that emoji is the only thing we do. In reality, there are over 120,000 characters defined, and as you see below, only a small fraction of them are emoji.

Davis goes on to explain that their purview is over a huge, huge repository of characters. What is unicode used for other than emoji? From their site:

The Unicode Consortium enables people around the world to use computers in any language. Our freely-available specifications and data form the foundation for software internationalization in all major operating systems, search engines, applications, and the World Wide Web. An essential part of our mission is to educate and engage academic and scientific communities, and the general public.

Put simply; every character you see can be transliterated because these men and women maintain a a standard that spans across a large amount of scripts which make up an enormous number of languages — even ancient ones.